41. Chapter Forty-One
Stanley
I wake up in Aspen Linwood’s bed with a practice to get to and absolutely no will to leave.
She’s tucked with her back against me, all warm and soft and breathing slow, her spine along my chest. And I am a man who woke up with the girl he’s been gone over for weeks pressed flush against him, so the situation has resolved itself downstairs without consulting me about it.
I should get up. I have skate. I kiss the side of her face instead, just because I’m allowed to now, just to feel like the luckiest idiot alive for one more second.
She turns into it without a flick of hesitation. I didn’t even know she was awake. Her lips find my mouth, and she kisses me like she was waiting, and that’s the end of my good intentions.
We’re kissing slow, and then not slow, and I’m grinding against her because she’s just so fucking perfect.
She pushes back with a roll of her hips that nearly takes the top of my head off.
Her hand slips into the waistband of my pants, and I groan into her neck.
As quickly as humanly possible, I get my own hand into her pajama shorts, and she hums against me, low and pleased, and I could die happy right here, this exact morning, no NHL, no hockey bros, just this.
She pulls my dick free and tugs her shorts to the side, and reality taps me on the shoulder before I can do anything stupid.
“Hang on –– I don’t have a condom on me, Linwood.” I press my forehead to the back of her neck.
She goes still, and then she groans — pure frustration, the sound of a woman who was very much enjoying her morning. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly. Believe me, I am very upset about this too.”
“This is a tragedy.” She pushes back against me anyway, just to be a menace about it, and it nearly takes the top of my head clean off. “An actual tragedy.”
“It really is.” I catch her hip and hold her still before she undoes me entirely, because I am not going to be careless with this girl — not her, not after everything, not ever, and especially not over a thing she’d have every right to be scared of.
One good morning isn’t worth putting a single ounce of that old fear back into her.
“Stop wiggling. You’re going to give me a stroke. ”
“Then do something about it,” she says, and arches into me, shameless.
I laugh into her hair, breathing her in. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“A deal.”
“Mm-hm.” I’m already moving, already sliding my hand down to where she wants it.
“I take care of you right now—” she gasps when I find what I’m after “—and tonight I come back over with a box, and we make up for lost time. As many times as you’ve got in you.
I make you come till you lose count.” I press a kiss to her shoulder. “How’s that sound?”
She doesn’t answer in words. She doesn’t have to. My fingers find her ready as can be.
“Shit,” I breathe against her shoulder. “You’re so wet, baby.”
“I want you,” she says, and I have never in my life been so happy to hear those words.
I press not one but two fingers inside of her and work her slow and then not slow, kissing every sound right out of her mouth.
Then I lose the last of my patience and disappear under the blanket, because I want my mouth all over her, and biting her shoulder is no longer enough.
I look down at what’s mine and only mine, and I grin like a fucking idiot.
Then I lean in and press my lips against her and kiss her with everything I’ve got.
The moan that leaves her chest is so sweet that I do it again.
I press my dick against the edge of the mattress and find that it works.
I’m dry humping her bed and licking her so good that she has a fist full of my hair in her hands.
There’s a thing I do with my tongue that pulls a sound out of her I would commit felonies to hear again, so I do that, and I keep going, and she’s gasping so fucking loud that I know she’s close.
She’s there. Her spine bowing off the bed, and that’s it for me too.
I finish right there, against my own shorts, like a teenager, and I don’t even have the dignity to be embarrassed about it.
I let her ride it out, and then I surface, wrecked, and make the mistake of checking the time.
“Shit. Baby, I have to get to the rink.”
“Mm.” She’s boneless, smiling, eyes half shut. “I’ve got a work thing this morning anyway. Didn’t prep half of it.”
I kiss her goodbye. She grabs onto me and kisses me right back. My dick springs again. I leave her melted into her sheets, and then I run home in dripping shorts, grinning like a lunatic.
I make it about four steps into my own house when I hear the first comment. Percy and Rowan are at the kitchen table. Benson’s coming down the stairs.
“Look at who it is,” he drawls, taking the steps one at a time.
I keep my face very, very neutral, which is a real athletic feat, given that I am currently a crime scene from the waist down and getting worse by the second.
“Did you make it official?” he asks.
The instant he’s off the bottom step, I break for the stairs. “Yeah, buddy. It’s all good.”
Blue appears at the top of them, cutting me off, because these guys have it out for me, apparently. “Whoa, whoa — what’s the rush?” He grabs my arm.
I swallow. I can still taste her. This is the best and worst morning of my life, and they are happening at the same time.
“I need to shower,” I say. “Immediately. For reasons.”
“Tell us,” Blue demands, not letting go. “Did we clear out of our own house last night for a good reason or not?”
And here’s where I have to be the guy they know — the annoying one, the one they’d take a bullet for and also cheerfully throw off a bridge — so I put a hand flat on Blue’s chest and look him dead in the eyes and say, with all the dignity a man in my specific condition can summon, “Gentlemen. A Hawthorne House resident does not kiss and tell.” I am sidling.
I am visibly sidling toward the bathroom.
“He also does not loiter making conversation when he is this close to being late for skate, so if you’ll all excuse me—”
“You’re walking weird,” Rowan calls from the living room. I don’t know when he appeared there, but now I’m in deep shit.
“I’m walking like a champion, Rowan.”
I give him a cocky smirk, and then I bolt, two stairs at a time, their laughter chasing me the entire way.
“Why the hell are you walking like that?” Benson calls out.
Blue watches me down the hallway. “Did you come in your pants?”
“Fuck off,” I mutter, flipping him off as I enter the bathroom. I shut the door behind me roughly nine seconds before the entire house rolls with laughter, talking about how they’re pretty sure I came in my pants.
Fuckers.
Skate is a gauntlet.
They know. The whole house knows, which means the whole team knows by the second water break, and I spend the morning getting roasted alive for breaking every unwritten law of Hawthorne House one after another.
Blue, of all people, gives me an entire speech about the rules — Blue, who barely strung two words together before Melly and broke every one of those same rules to win her with a puck over the glass.
The irony is not lost on me. I tell him so. He does not care even a little.
And Percy, who has said maybe forty words to me all season, glides past during a drill, says, “Was it worth it?” and glides off before I can answer.
It’s after, in the tunnel, that Benson falls into step beside me and drops his voice. “Hey. For real.” He bumps my shoulder with his. “I’m happy for you, man. We all are. You know that.”
“I know.” And I do. Under all the chirping, I know.
“You’re still an idiot,” he adds, conversational, because Benson can’t help himself. “But you’re a happy idiot, and you’re playing the best hockey of your life, so.” He shrugs. “I’ll allow it.”
“Your blessing means everything, cap.”
“It should.” The grin breaks. “Now let’s win us a national championship. We have to win this next game to be qualified.”
“That’s the plan, Reeve.”
I buy the condoms at the drugstore, and the teenager at the register makes the heroic professional decision to pretend I am not standing there at all, which I respect deeply. I walk to Aspen’s with the box zipped into my jacket like I’m transporting drugs.
She texts as I’m coming up the walk.
Aspen: Roommates gone for an hour. Hurry.
I do not need telling twice.
She opens the door before I can even knock, and then she’s pulling me in by the hoodie, her lips on mine.
She’s kissing me before we’ve cleared her living room, walking me backward toward her room with both hands already up under my shirt, and I get the box out of my jacket and hold it up between us like a trophy.
“As promised.”
“My hero,” she deadpans, plucks it out of my hand, tosses it onto the bed, and pushes me down after it.
She takes the reins, and I am overjoyed to let her.
She climbs over me, rolls the condom on with a focus that’s going to live rent-free in my skull for the rest of my natural life, and sinks down, and this time she lets me sit up enough to kiss her.
This time I get a hand between us and rub circles on her clit.
She rocks on me slow and devastating with her forehead pressed to mine.
“I came in my pants this morning,” I tell her, because if all the guys are going to know, then she absolutely needs to. I keep no secrets and have even less shame.
She goes still. “You did?”
I nod. She giggles.
“Don’t laugh.”
She laughs anyway. “I wish you’d told me. I could’ve cleaned it up for you.”
I look at her lips and briefly leave my own body. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Like it’s nothing. Like she didn’t just retroactively rearrange my entire morning.
I have no idea how I got this lucky with this girl.
Months ago, she was hostile. I had no idea this is what was hiding under that.
I kiss her on the nose and then I lie back and let her ride me.
I watch her perfect tits bounce. I rub circles on her clit and watch her come undone.
After she’s orgasmed, I flip her onto her hands and knees, enjoying my view. Face down, ass up.
“Fuck,” I breathe.
She laughs into her pillow when I run a palm over her, and then I press into her from behind, and the laugh turns into a long, low groan I feel all way in my toes. I move, and she cries out, so I get a hand around to her and rub her swollen clit.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Stan-ley.” My name in broken pieces.
“Erm-ing-ton.” She’s slamming back into me, hips bucking.
I work her faster, and she comes so hard around me that I’m gone right behind her — no chance, no control — pulling out so fast I nearly injure myself, heart going with the terror that I’ve ruined it, that I’ve come inside of her and broke my promise.
But the condom held. Everything held. She’s collapsed flat and boneless, moaning into her pillow, and the relief goes through me so hard it’s almost funny — and somewhere under it I know that I’ll check, every single time.
Make sure she’s safe. Make sure she never has to feel that old fear again.
And I’m completely fine with that. I’d check a thousand times.
We lie together after, both of us flattened, breathing like we just ran suicides.
And then she stretches and says into her pillow, “I think I can come again.”
I turn my head and look at her.
I grin. “Wanna find out?”
She nods.
So I reach for her pussy, rubbing her again, and her breath catches.
Her eyes find mine, and I settle in to make good on the exact thing I promised her this morning, which is to take my time, and to listen to the most contained, careful, buttoned-up person I have ever known come undone for me as many times as she’s got in her, loud and shameless and begging and mine.
I just finally found the only number I ever want to be counting.